Richard Moore, the former executive vice president of the legally embattled company Nexus, has been sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for federal tax crimes. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Despite an eleventh-hour attempt to fire his attorneys, which could have delayed sentencing for a third time, Richard Moore was sentenced in the federal courthouse in Harrisonburg on Thursday for two counts of withholding taxes from employees' paychecks and not giving them to the Internal Revenue Service. He was sentenced to six years and eight months in federal prison.
Moore was charged with a total of 18 counts of tax crimes in the case. He pled guilty to just two in January, but did admit in a statement that he committed other tax crimes between 2015 and 2024. He agreed to pay restitution to the IRS for the taxes he pocketed during that entire time, totaling more than $3 million.
Nexus was a conglomerate of businesses based in Verona that made the majority of its money in the immigration bond business – using illegally coercive practices for which the company, Moore, and two other executives have been found liable for a total of $811 million in another case.
The day before sentencing, Moore attempted to fire his attorneys, alleging a conflict of interest. He wrote in an email to counsel that because prosecutors referenced emails between one of his attorneys and an accountant in their May sentencing memo, that the attorney could be asked to testify against Moore. However, prosecutors said they would not call the attorney as a witness, and the attorney could not cite a rule of professional conduct that would have been broken by this scenario. Chief U.S. District Judge Elizabeth K. Dillon denied the attorneys' motion to withdraw, noting that it was not timely, and they had not proven a conflict existed. Dillon added she wouldn't consider those emails when deciding on a sentence.
On Thursday, Dillon also accepted the evaluation from corrections psychologists that Moore was competent to assist in his own defense.
The government requested that Moore be given nine years and seven months in prison – the maximum according to sentencing guidelines, which took into account his criminal history of fraud, perjury, and contempt of court. William Montague, with the U.S. Department of Justice's Tax Division, said Moore was "unwilling to play by the rules that apply to everybody else."
Moore said he was sorry for what he'd done, that "Nexus was a hell," and that mental health treatment had been helping him. He added that he took a job at Waffle House earlier this year and just wanted "to be a normal person." While seven people wrote character reference letters for Moore, none of them showed up to testify on Thursday.
Judge Dillon commended Moore's gainful employment and mental health treatment, but said his punishment needed to reflect the severity of "a blatant disregard of the law" that had funded a lavish lifestyle.
Moore is also awaiting trial in Augusta County alongside his husband, Michael Donovan, and a former employee for allegedly stealing $400,000 from a young man who used to live with them.
